Counter-revolutionary Hu Feng clique

The trial of the counterrevolutionary Hu Feng clique ( Chinese 胡风反革命集团 ) was originally a dispute over literature in the People's Republic of China in the 1950s , which took on political features. In China it is generally considered to be the first literary trial (文字狱) of the People's Republic.

The trial is named after the main defendant, the writer and literary theorist Hu Feng . His theory about literature deviated from that of the communist leader Maos , so that Hu and his followers were politically persecuted.

This was followed by a campaign in which more than 2,100 people were classified as politically questionable. 92 people were arrested, 62 isolated, 75 removed from office. By 1956, 78 people were officially classified as "Hu Feng elements," including 23 as cadres. The actual number of people who were affected by this process, however, was far higher than the 2100 mentioned, as family members and people who had only remote contact with the group of people were also affected. Subsequent cultural-political persecutions and campaigns in the People's Republic of China also always referred to this process; he thus became the model for all subsequent purges.

In 1980, the Central Committee of the Communist Party decided to rehabilitate the "counterrevolutionary clique of Hu Feng". However, this decision did not become official until June 18, 1988 with Notice No. 16 of the Central Bureau.

background

Left: Hu Feng in the 1950s; Right: Hu Feng's arrest warrant from 1955

Hu Feng was a well-known literary theorist during the Republican era after 1911. He maintained a close relationship with Lu Xun , from whom he was greatly influenced. They wanted more individuality and humanity, while Mao wanted to see the class struggle processed in literature. Although Hu Feng supported the communist party politically and also opposed the “unrealistic” current of the established writers at the time, he showed a dissenting opinion on the “dialectical literature” and literary “objectivism” introduced from the Soviet Union .

As a result, even before the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, he came into conflict with communist writers such as Zhou Yang (周扬) and also with Mao. As early as 1936 there was a dispute over the direction of the league of left-wing writers of China between the slogans "Defense literature " (with Zhou Yang and Guo Moruo as representatives) and "Folk literature during the national revolutionary war" ("民族革命战争的大众文学", by Lu Xun and Hu Feng). At the same time, Zhou and Hu also argued over the question of realism. In 1938, Mao issued the requirement for literature to be "Chinese, optimistic and preferred by the Chinese people". Afterwards a discussion arose among left literary figures about what the “national form” of literature was. This discussion also showed different views between Hu and Mao. In the 1940s, Hu was sidelined because of this. The Folk Literature (大众文艺丛刊), published in Hong Kong in 1948 , became the main forum for criticism of Hu Feng's theory and his works. After the People's Republic was established in 1949, Hu and his followers became increasingly a minority. Even so, Hu retained his trust in politics and did not suspect that he would soon become a target of the "class struggle".

Prepress

In 1948, an event in memory of Lu Xun was held in Zhengding , at which the poet Ai Qing criticized Hu Feng's style without naming him. In early 1952, the literary newspaper (文艺报) published letters in its internal correspondence group that rejected Hu Feng's literary theory, thus opening the campaign.

On May 25, 1952, a friend of Hu Feng, the writer Shu Wu (舒芜) wrote a self-critical article in a regional party newspaper, in which he switched completely to Mao's line. On June 8, 1952, Renmin Ribao took over the article and added a foreword in which "the small literary clique" with "Hu Feng as leader" was wronged:

“In their literary works they unilaterally enlarge the meaning of the subject and emphasize so-called vitality. In reality, they deny revolutionary practice and the importance of consciousness restructuring. In essence, this is a capitalist, small-capitalist-individualistic literary theory. "

In September of the same year, the CCP Central Committee's Propaganda Department held four meetings to discuss Hu's theory. Hu also took part in them. The propaganda department took stock of his “main mistakes” and presented this summary to the Central Committee and Zhou Enlai . The main mistakes are:

“Neglecting worldview, using old realism to replace socialist realism. Essentially replacement of proletarian literature by capitalist, small capitalist literature.

Emphasis on abstract subjectivity, denying the need for small capitalists to reshape their thoughts and change their point of view. One-sided emphasis that intellectual writers are the most progressive representatives of the people. Contempt for the working people, especially the peasantry.

Glorification of Western European capitalist literature, contempt for the popular literary heritage. This is completely anti-Marxist literary theory ... In order to destroy the influence of the theory of Hu Feng and similar theories, it is decided ... to criticize it publicly with articles ... "

In early 1953, several articles that criticized Hu publicly appeared in the literary newspaper . Hu was then a board member of the Chinese Literature Association and a member of the National People's Congress . He felt wrongly criticized. With the help of his supporters, he prepared a report on the practice and situation of art and literature in recent years (关于解放以来的文艺实践情况的报告). In the manner of traditional scholars, he presented this letter to the highest authority in the Communist Party, the Politburo . The report has four sections:

Recap of the events of the past few years
Some theoretical clarifications
Examples from practice and party politics
proposals

Interference at the highest level

Above: Critique book issued by the youth publishing house; below: Hu Feng's private letters published by Volksverlag as evidence of counterrevolutionary machinations

In his report, Hu completely denied the criticisms made of him and emphasized his own point of view. He also criticized literary policy and measures "since the liberation" and presented his own suggestions. At the end of the year there was a large conference of the Writers' Union. The original aim was to discuss what attitude one should take to the classic work The Dream of the Red Chamber , and it was also about taking stock of the work of the literary newspaper . Mao and the Central Committee criticized the literary newspaper and the leadership of the literary association at the conference . Hu mistakenly assumed that this was due to his writing. He thought the time was ripe for a general attack on his opponents and settled in two speeches with the then leadership of the literary business. With that he stabbed a wasp's nest. At the end of the conference, Hu himself suddenly became the subject of the argument. Zhou Yang devoted a speech (Mao personally nodded off the text) We have to fight (我们必须战斗) especially the "Hu Feng problem". It is about the defense of Marxism, socialist realism.

Hu's report was forwarded from party headquarters to the board of the Writers' Union. On January 1st, 1955, Headquarters approved the Propaganda Department's criticism of Hu Feng's thoughts . In February, the Writers' Union began publicly criticizing Hu Feng. The second and fourth parts of Hu Feng's writing were published out of context in the literary newspaper. Mao instructed the Literature Association to "ruthlessly" criticize Hu Feng and his "capitalist idealism" as well as his "anti-communist, anti-people" literary theory. The nationwide campaign against Hu Feng has started. On April 1, Guo Moruo published an article in the Renmin Ribao called Hu Feng's Antisocialist Theses , parsing Hu Feng's writing point by point. Shortly thereafter, Shu Wu passed on private letters from Hu Feng from the 1940s to him. Later, everyone involved was ordered to hand over Hu Feng's private letters; if a search found that someone had defied this order, it would be punished as a crime.

Mao personally read these letters and instructed the Propaganda Department and the Ministry of Interior to bring a trial against the "counter-revolutionary clique around Hu Feng." On May 13, Renmin Ribao published these private letters as evidence of counterrevolutionary activities. They were later published as a book; Mao personally wrote a preface for it. In an article in the Renmin Ribao it was said, for example, that the "Hu-Feng elements" were "camouflaged counterrevolutionaries" and had previously been henchmen of the Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-shek , now they worked for an underground Kuomintang organization that is striving to regain power .

For the 20 days from May 18 to June 8, every day in the Renmin Ribao on page 3, over two-thirds of the space, sometimes the entire page, was used to publish articles, letters to the editor, and cartoons against Hu Feng. Sometimes more pages were added. The headline read in large characters: Be vigilant, expose Hu Feng . In the following month, another 15 full-page articles were published under the title The Counter-Revolutionary Hu Feng Clique Resolutely and Completely Destroyed . The entire propaganda machinery of the country was mobilized, hundreds of thousands of propaganda books, comics and caricatures were printed and distributed in a short time.

The pressure generated by the official propaganda institutions was immense. Soon Hu Feng was slowly isolated from the literary circles (划清界限, clearly draw the line). A typical example was that of Ba Jin written and in the People's Daily published articles Hu Feng counter-revolutionary clique must be completely destroyed (必须彻底打跨胡风反党集团).

Arrests

On May 16, 1955, Hu Feng was arrested. The arrest warrant was only issued by the People's Congress on the 18th. Hu was first detained in a police station for three months, then sent to a Beijing prison. He was not officially sentenced until the end of 1965. Many more people were condemned as counter-revolutionaries because of him. According to a report by the Ministry of the Interior, the Supreme People's Prosecutor's Office and the Supreme People's Court, between 1955 and 1956 a total of over 2,100 people were classified as politically suspicious, 92 people arrested, 62 interned and 73 removed from office. By 1956, a total of 78 people were officially classified as "Hu Feng elements," including 23 cadres. Among them were numerous well-known writers and intellectuals.

After the 1965 conviction

It wasn't until November 26, 1965, that a court sentenced Hu Feng to 14 years in prison. At that time, Hu had already been in prison for over 10 years. The remaining four years were parole.

After the party line at that time, anything to do with Hu Feng was banned. Even books by Friedrich Engels and Maxim Gorki , insofar as they had been translated from “Hu-Feng elements”, were covered by the ban.

The Cultural Revolution began in 1966 . The Hu Feng couple were exiled to Sichuan for work. In November 1967, Hu Feng was detained for no reason. Because he wrote poetry on newsprint, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in January 1970 for writing counterrevolutionary poetry on a picture of Mao.

During the Cultural Revolution, Hu Feng's opponents at the time were also persecuted. Zhou Yang was arrested. Before that, Shu Wu was classified as a "right element" in the Hundred Flower Movement and had to endure all kinds of persecution and humiliation in the Cultural Revolution.

Rehabilitation

In 1978, Hu Feng was released from prison. In 1980, the Central Committee decided to overturn the verdict against the "counter-revolutionary Hu Feng clique" and to rehabilitate Hu Feng. Document No. 76 of the Central Committee states: “The trial against the 'counterrevolutionary clique of Hu Feng' arose from the historical situation at that time. Two essentially different conflicts were mixed up. Some comrades who have expressed a wrong opinion or followed religion have been mistakenly classified as counter-revolutionary or counter-revolutionary clique. The Central Committee decided to revise this. ”Nonetheless,“ the literary theory and the views of Hu Feng are largely wrong ”and“ an expression of petty-bourgeois individualism and idealism ”,“ a minority of the comrades around Hu Feng formed a small clique and opposed it the leadership of literature by the party and damaged the unity of revolutionary literature ”; in addition, Hu Feng held "counter-revolutionary offices", wrote "anti-communist articles" and "carried out counterrevolutionary propaganda" in the 1920s; these "historical problems" would remain.

After rehabilitation, Hu Feng became the MP of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference , Commissioner of the Literature Association, Advisor to the Writers' Association, and Advisor to the Institute of Art. Hu Feng died in 1985, but his family members were dissatisfied with the rehabilitation texts from 1980, and particularly with the official obituary. His body was laid out for a long time before he was buried. In April, the Ministry of the Interior, with the approval of the Party Headquarters Secretariat, issued Notice No. 50, removing the words "historical problems" from the first rehabilitation.

In January 1986, party headquarters decided to revise the historical judgment on Hu Feng. On June 18, 1988, with the announcement that comrade Hu Feng would be rehabilitated as far as possible , the party headquarters revoked the judgments of individualism, clique formation, and idealism. Only then was the “counter-revolutionary Hu Feng clique” finally rehabilitated.

Historical legacy and influence

The party headquarters then used the trial of Hu Feng and his supporters to organize a nationwide cleansing campaign. Within two months, a total of 29,230 "counter-revolutionaries" and other "bad elements", 12,488 "suspicious counter-revolutionary elements" and a large number of "cliques" were uncovered. A report to the Soviet Union said that over 12 million people were screened across China. The reviews began in June 1955 and lasted through mid-September, with 22.2 million people "scrutinized". 118,000 of them were “exposed” as counter-revolutionaries, traitors and felons and 11,000 cliques were exposed. However, later in the 1980s, Hu Feng and his followers were gradually fully rehabilitated. Not a single accusation against him stood. Over ten million people had been the victims of suspicion and persecution for vain reasons.

Thinking about this process continues to this day. Hu Feng later said that he was disgraced because Mao “doesn't like dissenting opinions, because he doesn't like it when other people disagree. He probably also had the feeling that I didn't adore him enough. "

Some historians believe that the criticism of Hu Feng is in fact directed against Lu Xun . At that time one wanted to eradicate certain theories of Lu Xun ideologically. Generally, Mao is held responsible for the process. In recent years, however, the opinion has also been voiced that the process cannot be traced back to Mao alone, but that it was the fault of a violent system. The historian Jia Zhifang (贾植芳) even said: "Instead of Zhou Yang, Hu Feng would have raged even more."

Already in the Hu Feng Trial, many phenomena became visible that later appeared extensively in the Cultural Revolution: creating false evidence, mobilizing the official propaganda machine, nationwide persecution. In terms of the actions carried out and the language used, the two events are strikingly similar. Shu Wu issued private letters, and later it became mandatory. The moral values of the people and the intellectuals suffered devastating damage. The media has been completely turned into a propaganda machine for politics. Renmin Ribao stood out on this point. The appearance of the media was destroyed as a result.

The process also left deep wounds among intellectuals. After this event, the optimistic atmosphere, especially among the older generation who still lived and worked in the republic, disappeared. Many of these intellectuals have lived in fear since that time, and many committed suicide. The atmosphere among intellectuals was then described as "depressing", and the spirit of optimism was gone. Many writers stopped writing afterwards. The number of literary works fell dramatically, their subjects and forms impoverished. The intellectuals' belief in the Communist Party and in a "New China" suffered a severe blow.

Individual evidence

↑ ^a ^b Central Committee of the Communist Party to the Ministry of the Interior, the Supreme People's Procuratorate and the Supreme People's Court of China (ed.): Report on the trial of the "counterrevolutionary Hu Feng clique" . September 19, 1980 (Chinese (simplified): 关于 “ 胡风反革命集团 ” 案件的答复报告 .).

↑ Xia Yongan (夏永安): The Astounding Numbers of the Hu Feng Incident (胡风事件中几组令人叹息不止的数字) ( zh-Hans ) Website of the Renmin Ribao. August 25, 2003. Retrieved January 2009.

↑ Zhou Zhengzhang (周正章): The threefold rehabilitation of Hu Feng (胡风的三次平反) ( zh-Hans ) 党史信息 Nachrichten (News sheet on the party history). December 2005. Archived from the original on May 22, 2009. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Accessed March 2009.

↑ Lin Mohan (林默涵): The History of the Hu Feng Trial (胡风事件的前前后后) . In: New literary history (新文学史料) . 1989.

↑ Original text of the letter ( Memento of the original dated May 22, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2
↑ Guo Moruo (郭沫若): Anti-Socialist Hu Feng Theses (反社会主义的胡风纲领) ( zh-hans ) Renmin Ribao. April 1, 1955. Retrieved March 31, 2008.
↑ Mao Zedong: Manuscripts by Mao Zedong after the establishment of the state . tape 5 , p. 112–115 (Chinese (simplified): 建国以来毛泽东文稿 .).
↑ Ba Jin: Hu Feng's counterrevolutionary clique must be completely destroyed (必须彻底打跨胡风反党集团) ( zh-hans ) May 26, 1955. Retrieved March 30, 2008.
↑ АВПРФ, ф.0100, оп48, д.9, п.393, л.195-197
↑ Xiao Guwen (晓谷文): Memories of Hu Feng (胡风回忆) Archived from the original on June 2, 2016. Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: New material on the history of literature (新文学史料) . 1996, 1st edition. Retrieved April 23, 2019. @1@ 2

↑ Xie Yong (谢泳): A section of history that should not be forgotten (一段不应该被忘记的历史 —— 从一份被遗落的文档看中国的政治文化) ( zh-hans ) Huanghe (黄河). 2003. Archived from the original on May 23, 2009. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved March 30, 2009. @1@ 2

↑ 牛汉 (Niu Han): 牛汉：现代文学史要重写 (Niu Han: The history of modern literature must be rewritten) . In: 南方人物周刊 (weekly newspaper People in the South ) . April 7, 2009. Retrieved April 10, 2009.

↑ Shaanxi Provincial Archives, 123-40-1, pp. 128-132. Quote: In its report to the Central Committee, the Ten-Headed Commission admits that, especially during the review phase, many people committed suicide.

[bericht-1] Central Committee of the Communist Party to the Ministry of the Interior, the Supreme People's Procuratorate and the Supreme People's Court of China (ed.): Report on the trial of the "counterrevolutionary Hu Feng clique" . September 19, 1980 (Chinese (simplified): 关于 “ 胡风反革命集团 ” 案件的答复报告 .).

[Xia_Yongan-2] Xia Yongan (夏永安): The Astounding Numbers of the Hu Feng Incident (胡风事件中几组令人叹息不止的数字) ( zh-Hans ) Website of the Renmin Ribao. August 25, 2003. Retrieved January 2009.